For all its gauche excesses in style and art, Victorian Britain was still very much that - Britain, and thus very British. So no heaving bosoms and bursting corsets for Ralph Fiennes in this sedate but scintillating period drama, in which he examines the effects of Charles Dickens' love on a young aspiring actor, and her travails in adjusting to her rapidly changing life. Its title is apt from a historical perspective, yet Felicity Jones' Nelly Ternan is most visible indeed in Fiennes' film from Abi Morgan's eloquent screenplay. She is lit and framed as an icon of statuesque beauty, despite her modest attire and her petite physique. Jones' thorough and sympathetic performance, combined with Fiennes' eagerness to allow these women's exploration of this essential figure in literature to be given as extensive a berth as possible, contributes to one of the most potent portrayals of a young woman's mind in film this year. It is not a condescending portrayal, nor a seedy one, but a generous one, almost theatrically generous, in the classical (and rather Dickensian) manner in which she is so fully fleshed-out. Succumbing to the inevitability of this true tale, Fiennes instead insists on the immediate, on crafting individual scenes of grace and a subtle power, sturdy pieces of filmmaking enhanced by fine technical work - he elicits career-highs from cinematographer Rob Hardy and composer Ilan Eshkeri, and the production and costume designs by Maria Djurkovic and Michael O'Connor are exemplary, in being so thoughtfully created, with a crucial 'lived-in' aspect to their appearance. The narrative device of the extended flashbacks as the core of the story is an overused one, though it is well-employed here, since the magnitude of Nelly's troubling recollections warrants so much rumination on their every detail, both broad and intimate, and since the chronologically latter portions of the film are potentially its most compelling.
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